A new
production of La Boheme, the story of a French
embroidery heroine
lost in an Italian opera by Puccini (pronounced pooch-eenie) was aired
on PBS Wednesday night March 28, 2001. For those of you who were
lucky enough not to tune in, and so are unfamiliar with the piece, it
is,
next to Days of our Lives and All My Children, one of the most beloved
dramatic productions of our times. It has one good song, in the
saloon
scene, as long as you don't know what the lyrics mean

When
originally produced it was almost laughed off the
European stage.
Its American introduction, about four years later, received something
less
than an enthusiastic reception, as is shown by comments from the
dramatic
reviewer in the New York Tribune, who referred to it as
inconsequential,
insignificant or possibly insipid. I forget which.

All
three are correct, in any event, yet it is now considered
the most
beloved of all operas. How could such a work come to such heights
from such low beginnings? The answer is simple. It
didn't.
Culture and taste have descended so far during the intervening time
that
La Boheme now gets rave reviews. Karl Marx was the catalyst, of
course.
We can attribute all the cultural disintegration since the late
Nineteenth
Century to him.

The
story (or book, as it is sometimes called in musicals) is
as follows.
A bunch of self-indulgent Robert Maplethorpe types once lived in a
large
European city. Since in those days socialism hadn't yet taken
over,
art survived only by patronage -- which means handouts from the
rich.
Thus, bad artists, unlike today, couldn't make a living. Worst of
all, large European cities at that time were overrun with people
who didn't serve lunch and drinks for free. Many landlords
expected
to get what is known as "rent" for the use of their apartments. A
shocking, capitalist situation.

Anyway,
as the story opens we see bad artists singing boring
lyrics
about love. Later, we see these same bad artists singing boring
lyrics
about love in a café where they are eating and drinking food and
wine they don't have the money to pay for. Later, yet, Mimi, the
woman who makes a living sewing flowers, gets a cold and her artistic
lover
who didn't bother to marry her watches her die. Bohemians to this
day think marriage is bourgeois -- pronounced boo-zhwa, not
boor-gee-oys
-- which means middle class boring, as in people who work for a living,
take care of their families and don't get drunk and vomit in the street
every night.

Are you
following this? Why is your head nodding as if
you are
falling asleep? Do you want to get an invitation to a party
thrown
by Beverly Sills, or don't you? Pay attention!

There is
a giant break in the story between the third and
fourth act,
or possibly the third and the fifth act if you include the missing act
as an act even though it isn't there. This ghostly sequence, had
Puccini left it in, would have taken place in a courtyard full of
furniture
removed from a room whose rent hadn't been paid. Nobody knows why
Puccini cut out that section, since it explains critical plot elements
that have puzzled audiences ever since. Arguments by intelligent
people counter such statements by saying the plot is so stupid that
eliminating
a
great chunk of it is worth an increase in the ticket price.

Anyway,
as the putative Act Three, or perhaps Act Four, opens
the bohemians
are painting walls instead of bad pictures. Doing something
useful
has them depressed, so they sing boring lyrics about wishing to paint
the
sky, and about the pleasures of physical love with women who they don't
have to marry. Outside in the street, Mimi is coughing up her
guts
because she doesn't have any medicine.

Toward
the end is a musical section called the vecchia
zimarra.
Vecchia is Italian for old. There is no direct translation for
zimarra,
although a variation of the word has to do with a coat worn by a rich
person.
So this leads one to assume that the term refers to a second-hand coat
from the Goodwill -- an "old coat once owned by a rich man." In
this
application the coat has lots of pockets where bohemians can put their
belongings after they have been thrown out for not paying their
rent.
You can think of a vecchia zimarra as a song about an ancient artistic
European supermarket shopping basket for street bums. Rudolpho,
Mimi's
worthless lover, sells his vecchia zimarra to buy some medicine or
something,
which, since he can't pay his rent, makes him a homeless person, and
takes
it to her.

In the
end, Thank God, the eternally smarmy Mimi dies so we
don't have
to listen to any of her juvenile lyrics any more. Rudolpho
survives
her, but the opera ends about then, so we must only suffer through a
couple
stanzas of equally smarmy, self-pitying lyrics matched by Puccini's
equally
boring and atonal music.

Finis
Operatique La Boheme, may it rest in piece and stay
there.

The
great promise in this new production is that it has been
moved forward
in time to the beginning of the First World War. Some of the
bohemians
are dressed in uniforms of the period, and it leads one to hope that
they
will soon go off to fight the Germans, and with any luck get gassed in
the trenches. Sadly, however, some of them must have survived to
breed more little bastard bohemians, since the opera survived WWI and
is
performed to this day.